My long-time, dear friend, sweetjezebel commented on my last post asking why someone like me is interested in the garbage surrounding Sarah Palin. We disagree politically so when something political comes up, I always think of her and try to see things from her perspective. Without knowing it, she really makes me examine my thoughts and gut reactions to things on the political spectrum and really think them through. I guess it's god practice for me. Anyway... when I started responding to her questions, the list of reasons started growing, one thought led to another and my response got longer and longer so I decided to make this a separate post.

In my original, snarky post, I said that I was shocked that the GOP didn't check for Myspace info on Palin's kids or her soon-to-be son-in-law, that most employers check Myspace. sweetjezebel said that's true, but they don't check the kids. In my opinion, the reason for McCain's camp to have checked the kids is clear-- cover your ass. Avoid scandal. We are talking about the race to be the President and Vice President of the United States of America in a troubled time in our history. Is there anything more important than that? The difference in the particulars of the comment is that when becoming a police officer, you're becoming a public official representing government and our laws, but your personal ideas, morals, ideas and values don't come into the picture. As a police officer, you're a physical manifestation of the law itself. It's about the job, not the person.

When vetting a VPchoice the party was supposed to go through all the press available about Palin, her family history, her co-workers, her life to see if there are/were any skeletons, to see if the public figure and the ideas/morals/values she represents are really a reflection of the woman herself, if the entire picture is in reality that which McCain wants to respresent for his campaign. The campaign people keep saying that Palin was fully vetted before her name was told to the press. (Conveniently and strategically, the day after a major speech by Obama and timed exactly to take media coverage from him and shift it to McCain.)

McCain went way out on a limb, ignoring the advice of top party officials. It's reported that Karl Rove was pushing Fred Thompson as the running mate, representing the choice of Bush himself. Someone else was pushing Romney. McCain went against everyone to pick this woman. Big deal, right? Except that he chose a virtual unknown woman in the party with very little experience, passing over other women in the party with more experience, solid backgrounds, strong ideals, like the former governor of NJ, Christine Todd Whitman and others. It's said that to really have a chance against the momentum of the Democrats, he needed to pick a woman. Also, in order to court the evangelicals and the extreme right, he needed to pick someone who was staunchly pro-life. That limited the selections dramatically. Pundits are saying that those two qualifiers left *only* Sarah Palin as an option.

So by choosing someone that isn't as "famous" or familiar in the realm of national politics, and not really spilling the beans about who she is, it sets the press on a mission to find out about her-- who is she, what does she stand for? Is she really as conservative as she says? We couldn't look to her achievements or her record because there simply isn't anything to look at. How do we get to know who Sarah Palin is? We look at her life in absence of a long political career.

This becomes a huge factor in her press coverage because of something done by the McCain campaign itself--- they keep running ads saying Obama isn't ready to lead, that he's too inexperienced to be president because he's only served 2 terms in the Senate and 9 terms in the senate of the state of Illinois. That's a heck of a lot of experience when you compare him to Sarah Palin. And we have to make that comparison, we're duty bound to make that comparison because of McCain's age and his health history. She would be his successor if anything happened to him in office. He's been a POW (how he loves to remind us of that!) and had skin cancer and is old. It's not too far a stretch to think that perhaps he could die in office. Then we'd be left with a president who really has no experience except as a mayor of a VERY small town and a short time as the governor of a politicallly insignificant state, her administration rife with scandals. Is she ready to negotiate with foreign dignitaries? To define policies that affect millions and millions of people? To be the most powerful person world?

We have no clear way to judge except to look at her life. It's unfortunate that she has a lot of issues in her personal life that have attracted attention and make me (and lots of other people) second guess her ability to lead our country.

This kind of personal soap opera stuff would be huge even if she were only running for governor of a large, populous state like New York or California. Think of all the press the CA gov race got when Arnold was first elected. All of the candidates, national news, magazines discussing the candidates. All of that even though the election had little bearing on the rest of the country. An even more direct comparison is that of the national media coverage during the Eliot Spitzer scandal. It was everywhere that the governor of NY was involved with a prostitute. Why did the media care so much? Because he held himself up as ethical, a reformer, a person who toed the line and would hold everyone to his own standards.

Americans love soap operas. They love to see the mighty laid low. So in seeking to learn who Sarah Palin is the media had to dig deeper than perhaps they normally would because she just hasn't been involved in politics that long and she's holding herself up much the same way as Spitzer. She's called herself ethical but she's currently under investigation and just hired a lawyer to deal with a situation where she fired someone who wouldn't fire the ex-husband of her sister.

She's being used by the McCain camp as a shining example of motherhood. Much has been made of the fact that she's a mother of five by the Republicans themselves. You can't hold up a sign pointing to her as a great mom and then not expect people to take a closer look. The GOP was very focused on her decision to have baby Trig, with Downs Syndrome. They said, "See! Even when she knew that there were medical issues with the baby, she didn't abort. What a great mother!" and then the press found out that she travelled to Texas late in her pregnancy. With her amniotic fluid leaking she decided to stay and give a speech and instead of going to a hospital to make sure everything was okay with the baby, she went to the airport and flew to Seattle. Isntead of then going to a hospital, she waited for a connecting flight to Anchorage, Alaska-- the city in her home state with the best hospitals and despite the thirteen hours since the amniotic fluid stated leaking, she still didn't go to a hospital. In that situation, the only thing plugging the tear in the sac is the head of the baby. This is a woman who'd previously had four children. Ask any woman with multiple children and she'll tell you, after the first one, the deliveries come fast. She'd already waited 13 hours and put that baby through pressure changes and long flights. Think about how any adult feels during takeoff and landing, through turbulence. How does a baby, plugging the hole in his mom's sac, waiting to be born, feel through that experience? So instead of going to a hospital in Anchorage, she got in a car and had her husband drive her for more than 45 minutes, to a tiny hospital in a tiny town, deep in Alaska.

What kind of woman does that? What kind of mother does that? What kind of mother does that to a child she already knows has medical issues? These are valid questions I would ask of the woman down the street. To ask them of a woman who is being pointed to as a shining example of motherhood is absolutely necessary. It's a question of being made to stand behind your assertions and prove your point. You can't go into a court of law and call someone a criminal without proof, without hard evidence that leaves no question in the mind. Our political parties can't offer up someone for us to vote on, call them a good mother and then not be able to prove it expecially when there's evidence that points to the contrary.

So then The Daily Kos speculates that perhaps she's not an awful mother, those flights and the long delay didn't mean much because she wasn't actually pregnant, it was her daughter having the baby. Her late announcement and non-pregnant appaearance were all just a cover-up to spare her daughter's (and her own) reputation as a fundamentalist Christian conservative. It's kind of far-fetched but not impossible to believe. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that that conspiracy theory came from either the GOP or the dems themselves. Look at what happened as a result, an announcement that Bristol is pregnant.

Later in the day we have Fox News and politicians saying that her family is off limits, that it's too low to bring her kids into the political arena. Even Obama is saying that and on this point, I disagree with him. Obama isn't holding himself up as a shining example of good fatherhood. Neither is McCain. Palin is. She's being used as an example and she played to it in her own speech. You can't talk about your son and his enlistment and deployment (both conveniently on 9/11- a fact she felt compelled to share several times to play on the heartstrings of Americans) and then expect us not to want to know about your other four children. Both she, and the campaign people who wrote her speeches, brought her kids into the mix, not the media. They just took the information they had and looked deeper.

So when she had her family all gathered together to bask in her political glow and there's poor Bristol, wearing black, her entire midsection covered in a baby blanket, holding a baby in her arms in an uncomfortable and unusual position, there's bound to be questions. Why isn't the baby is a carrier or stroller? A five-month-old is not light to carry and hold. Why Bristol holding him and not the big strong man that is the baby's father? (What is Mr. Palin's name?)

Still, I question the judgment of Sarah Palin, and her family, and her ambition for her decision to pursue this campaign only five months after having a special needs baby. Sure, she has a large family and a support network. Sure, she went back to work right after bearing her children. Still, can she be held up as an example mother when she's ignoring her SPECIAL NEEDS baby to campaign? Doesn't he need his mother more than she needs to get to a higher office than the one she already holds? Doesn't he need his mother more than his sisters or grandmother or father? It's an archaic notion and mysogynistic, I'm sure someone is going to tell me, but it's true. I'm sorry. Children need their mother and unless it's a situation where the mother is unfit, I can't see campaigning as a valid excuse to push your special needs baby off on family members. I don't have to look past my own friends list here on LJ to see much better examples of mothers who truly love and support their children; mothers who are actively raising their children and teaching them values.

Would I look as closely at a male politician's family life? Don't we always? What happened to Gary Hart? What happened to John Edwards? To Eliot Spitzer? To Bill Clinton? Their personal lives all came into play in the political arena. You can't cry sexism just because Palin is a woman. Across the board, across gender lines, all politicians should be treated the same.

So back to the original question: how is what the applicants child does in their free time any reflection of Palin herself?

It goes back to putting Palin up on a dais and saying that she's a mother of five, of letting her crow about her family and using it as a political tool to win votes. Is Bristol's teenage pregnancy a reflection on Palin, yeah, it sort of is because of who Palin is. She's not your mom or my mom. Our mothers didn't get in front of a crowd and make decisions for other women. Sarah Palin wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy from the millions of American women who have to face that horrible choice every day. Sarah Palin wants sex ed in schools to be abstinence only and she's made a point of saying so and working toward it. So when her teenaged daughter turns up pregnant, the contrast between what Sarah believes and what actually works becomes a media issue. If Sarah hadn't pushed abstinance-only education as an issue, I don't think anyone would care about her daughter. People were shocked by Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy but it was almost expected, acceptable, not out of the ordinary. The irony of the Palin situation makes it newsworthy and enforces the point that sex ed that doesn't teach about birth control doesn't work.

So if Sarah Palin's abstinence-only teachings don't work at home, how can we expect them to work on a national level, where some/most teenagers don't have the value system that was taught to Bristol Palin? That is definitely a political issue.

Maybe I was a bit rash in saying that the McCain camp should have checked out Levi Johnston's Myspace page. Apparently, he hadn't logged in in a year. Apparently Bristol's pregnancy was a known fact in Wasilla. Think about how many people are working at McCain's campaign headquarters. How many political specialists, analysts, secretaries, assistants, interns are there working for him? Is it seriously too far fetched to think that maybe, before the announcement of his running mate, someone could have taken fifteen minutes to poke around on Myspace? I believe there is an official McCain profile there. Would it have taken so long to look up the names of her kids and click on some links. Bristol had a page. If Levi wasn't her Number 1, I'd be shocked. How much media feeding frenzy could they have avoided with two or three mouse clicks? The campaign says they knew about the pregnancy. Did they not think to take a look at the father?

My mind wanders and I have several thoughts on the matter:

Did the GOP seek the circus out so that Bristol could be used as a Pro-life poster child?

Who started the rumor of the pregnancy and who first questioned Trig's parents?

Will there be a martyr for the cause in the unborn Johnston/Palin baby in that the stress of the scrutiny and judgment will lead to a miscarriage, if there really is a baby? (please don't misinterpret that I wish that heartache on any woman)

Who gains the most from any of this?

So it's not just a matter of a nosy electorate or a pushy media. Every bit of information leads somewhere else and a lot of it has bearing on who Sarah Palin is, what she represents, what we can expect from her as a leader and what we should expect of her.

McCain didn't go out on a limb. It's fairly well known that he wanted to run with Lieberman as his VP, but the party said "No, we're not going to allow you to do that." and John just rolled over like the obedient little lapdog he is.

Still, the more that comes out about Palin and what a massively unqualified, hypocritical, power-abusing nutjob she is, I'm starting to wonder if McCain didn't pick her just to give the middle finger to all of those who refused to let him have his way.

It really smacks of the little kid who, when told he can't have any pie, throws mud on the pie to make sure no one else wants it either. And that's about the emotional maturity level I expect from McCain

It's funny you should write about that. I'd forgotten the Lieberman angle.

Sometime yesterday I received an email from one of the political groups I subscribe to about a very "swift boat" type interview done with someone who was with McCain in the Naval Academy and also there (longer) in the Hanoi Hilton. The main thing I took away from it is that McCain has a volatile temper. He's vindictive and petty.

I'm betting McCain's campaign gets him really hopped up on Valium before his debates with Obama. We know Obama can keep his cool, and we know that the American populace has no problem voting for the loser of a debate, so all they have to do is keep McCain from actually lunging for Obama's throat.

I think McCain is actually a sign that the Pub's thought "oh shit, after Bush, we won't get another Pub in the White House this election." It's like they need a few more years to groom someone (because they really didn't have a good candidate), so they threw McCain to us because enough people like him...

And then it came down to Obama and Clinton, and that was a FUBAR'd mess and the Pubs thought "oh shit! We coulda had a chance! Crap! Find a minority! Find a woman! AAAAHHH" and oops, McCain made a hasty decision and chose Palin.

The talk is that McCain wanted Lieberman but the Party said, "NO FREAKIN WAY!"

Talk at the convention is, duh, she wasn't fully vetted, it happened in a hurry, but we expect you all to toe the party line.

It's almost impossible to keep up with the breaking news on this and I have a real "edge of my seat" feeling.

I think the big question mark left in this mess is the PUMAs (and I didn't know what that meant until an hour ago, though I'd seen the word all over the place) and middle America. On one hand, I've seen that people like Wayne's parents, fundie Christians, believe we all make mistakes and forgive her for the unwed mother, but how do they feel about the corruption, the ethics questions, the Alaska secessionist movement and the motherhood question.

I just read (and will post) a great editorial on the issue of motherhood vs. ambition.

Christian-right leaders and conservative stalwarts have praised the decision of Bristol Palin, the daughter of Governor Sarah Palin, to carry her child to term. She is 17 and conceived this child out of wedlock. Now imagine she wasn't the daughter of a prominent Republican politician but an average person. Now imagine she was black.

What do you think conservatives would have to say about her? "Typical, urban youth with no sense of responsibility raised with loose morals who plans to depend on the state to take care of her child." You know it. It's not within dispute. That's exactly what they would say.

Barack Obama has told everyone to lay off this because it is a personal, family matter. Yes, but it also has public policy ramifications. Governor Palin is for abstinence only education. Well, that obviously didn't work.

Has she learned her lesson? Will she now amend her policy position on this matter given her personal record of failure in implementing this ridiculous stance?

Notice I am not blaming Bristol. Quite the opposite. People like me are the ones that defend the Bristols of the world. It is conservatives like James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh and yes, Governor Palin who usually attack people who find themselves in Bristol's situation. They demand a dogmatic adherence to moral strictures and chastise and belittle women who have children out of wedlock. Especially if they are women of color.

Which brings us back to Obama. Do you think the Republicans would lay off of Obama if his 17 year-old daughter had gotten pregnant out of wedlock? You know the answer to that question. Everyone does.

"This is what the permissive liberal attitude gets you. If you allow your children to think everything is acceptable, they have no boundaries. They wind up getting themselves in trouble like this. It's a predictable result of the liberal lifestyle."

And that's before the subtle and not so subtle racial implications are brought into this. There is a constant double-standard of how black and white people and politicians are covered in this country. When a young black girl gets pregnant, she's looking to get money from welfare. When a young white woman gets pregnant, she made an unfortunate mistake and her family is being supportive in trying to help the make the best of it.

Cindy McCain was addicted to drugs and stole from her own charity to feed her addiction. Now what do you think the Republicans would have done if Michelle Obama had done that? How do you think the press would have covered it? You think they would have called it a simple mistake and moved on?

When presented with these examples, no matter who you are, you know in your heart that this double standard exists. All of this is not said to condemn Bristol Palin or Cindy McCain. This is to get you to think twice about your own assumptions about the next time you hear a story of a young African-American woman who got pregnant in the inner city or a minority who got addicted to drugs and committed a crime to feed that addiction.

Again, I'm a one question pony (my brain still isn't functioning on all cylinders quite yet)... Do we ever have concrete PROOF that the kids myspace/facebook pages were NOT checked? Again, I will state that it has no relevance to the candidate themselves what the child does (hell, if it did then when they look at my stepsons or drug addict cousins page I'll be SCREWED!) but I am curious to know whether they were definitely NOT looked at. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps they just didn't CARE becaue it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things in a state where the age of consent is I think... 15 or 16?

And now I'm all tired out :) I will come back for more. I will say I enjoyed your thoughts and your kind words to me in the first paragraph. I'm happy we've managed to maintain our friendship through this election thus far :)

McCain's campaign people didn't even bother to check the archives of Wasilla's newspaper, nor did they pull an FBI file on her. I'm pretty sure they didn't check Bristol & Levi's myspace pages.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really mean anything (on the kids, not the mom) that they didn't check, it just would have saved them and their candidates some headache.

As far as not actually vetting Palin, that's become more than obvious. It's *WRONG.* Lying about it to the American people over and over is wrong.

From the NY Times: Advisers to Mr. Pawlenty and another of the finalists on Mr. McCain’s list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.

“They didn’t seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before,” said a Republican close to the campaign. “This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.”People familiar with the process said Ms. Palin had responded to a standard form with more than 70 questions. Although The Washington Post quoted advisers to Mr. McCain on Sunday as saying Ms. Palin had been subjected to an F.B.I. background check, an F.B.I. official said Monday the bureau did not vet potential candidates and had not known of her selection until it was made public.

In Alaska, several state leaders and local officials said they knew of no efforts by the McCain campaign to find out more information about Ms. Palin before the announcement of her selection, Although campaigns are typically discreet when they make inquiries into potential running mates, officials in Alaska said Monday they thought it was peculiar that no one in the state had the slightest hint that Ms. Palin might be under consideration.

“They didn’t speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn’t speak to anyone in the business community,” said Lyda Green, the State Senate president, who lives in Wasilla, where Ms. Palin served as mayor.

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” Ms. Phillips said. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

The current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, said she had not heard of any efforts to look into Ms. Palin’s background. And Randy Ruedrich, the state Republican Party chairman, said he knew nothing of any vetting that had been conducted.

State Senator Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. “I heard not a word, not a single contact,” he said.

You have NO criticisms for Obama at ALL? Honestly??? I find that hard to believe. And who cares how long he took or why he did it... he's not even a candidate you're considering so leave all that to US to worry about.

Here's something I wonder... would you ever be happy with ANY Republican? Or would you always think they're "up to something" and "evil" and have bad intentions? Geez... I think you would have found fault with Ronald Reagan if you'd be of voting age in the early 80's!!! (and that man was/is a GOD, so there's nothing you can say to change my mind THERE!!!)

Not really, no. He wasn't me preference for the dem ticket-- I like Edwards, affair and all, but he represents the same ideals and values I have. A strong middle class. Preserving Roe v. Wade. Getting us off oil. Protecting the environment. Getting the hell out of Iraq. Diplomacy with the world.

Even if I agreed with everything else McCain wants. If he were on my side with everything but still wanted a woman who is so strongly pro-life that she's opposed to abortion even in the case of rape and incest, I couldn't give him my vote.

On that one issue, I could never vote for him. When you add in that she wants the nonsense that is creationism taught in schools, she burns books and supports abstinence only sex ed, she becomes my worse nightmare of a leader.

And that's really the biggest problem with the lack of vetting and her appointment in general. McCain is OLD. Most people retire at 65. Life expectancy in the US is 77, but McCain has had more than one bout with skin cancer and spent several years as a POW. All that considered, I don't want that woman second in command. Sorry, but being the governor of a state that has a population smaller than several US cities, being close to Russia and having been the mayor of a small town doesn't mean she has what it takes to be in charge of the greatest country in the world.

A week ago she said, on video, that she doesn't know what the VP does and now, she's in line to get that job?

I support other people's right to follow the religion of their choice, even if it's Islam, but when those people start telling me that I need to follow their religion, I have a problem with that.

Unfortunately I can't trust the American people to not find out the truth for themselves instead of falling for the old Republican standby that if they repeat a lie often enough, people start to believe it's the truth.

I actually really liked Ron Paul. Had he won the nomination, I would have voted for him.